A Visual Narrative Concerning Curriculum, Girls, Photography Etc.

Hedy Bach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315435558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This multi-genre book is a deconstructive project that reveals the elisions, blind spots, and loci within the complex web of daily life of four schoolgirls. The girls, who attend school and actively connect their learning to the study of art, drama, ballet and music programs in and out of school, visually documented their lives both inside and outside of classrooms, using disposable cameras to create 80 to 120 photographs. One-on-one conversations with them about their images were taped and transcribed, and the analysis of these images and texts provides a description of the "evaded curriculum" within adolescent life. The research exposes pain, reveals desire and pleasure, and expresses the intensity of joy in making and creating schoolgirl culture.

Notebook 1

I recognize something when looking in a mirror. I think about the other mirror, the one set opposite, in front and beside that creates infinite vision, as reflections reflect one another. What mirrors are set by their hands or by some body else’s? I ask how I function when so many mirror handlers and so many reflections are simultaneously apparent.

I felt that to locate self within the research I needed to turn the lens on self. I show my cameraworks from a workshop on Phototherapy with Judy Weiser. In writing “eyes wide shut” I document a reflexive photographic look at my lived experiences of being a female researcher. I ask who am I in the research? I question who I learn from? Part of my answer is in how I view discomfort in my body, separating self from my reflections but acknowledging that these reflections inform the creation of my identity. I reinvent myself through experiences that have been multiplied, ruptured, enveloped, expanded and lost: “Telling you is the most minor attempt at loyalty, it is the most elementary form of candor. But can I not suspect in confession a hope for absolution” (Cixous, 1994, p. 97).

As a girl I grew up believing that “seeing is learning.” I was certain that uncovering my desires would be accomplished only through agonizing female effort and that I would earn it through feminine chores. Was this a fallout from my training as a Judeo-Christian to be a “good girl?” As a good girl I searched for a middle ground for my sins, for the sins of others and for those I would never commit. It was a masochistic contract, a disruption, resulting in fiery images, rage, drugs, and crucifying my body.

I have inherited parts of this body and left parts behind. I am tied to my biography. I adopted sections of the glossy magazines that I read and carved out a self that clings to its cover story of being surveyor and surveyed. This “it” is me, no separation, no closure, not yet. Though I inherited a dual desire to be impenetrable and permeable, sealed and expanding I see a terrain of endless desert space. Even today, my identity is in a state of flux, my senses always alert, awkwardly poised, and exposed. I have continued to learn to live with these contradictory illusions.

no body said it would be simple

is this work?

i’m in the kitchen
writing on my lap top
i stare out of the window
a strange fog obscures the horizon
i have no excuse not to write
yet i feel
tied
by apron strings

seeing ‘dust gorillas’
dog, cat and human hair
vacuum/wash/fold
laundry piled miles high
run the dishwasher
oh don’t Ya forget to
write
this is work
isn’t it?

two of “my” girls are coming over
for coffee
i want to be cheery
live the cover story
even when i feel down
i’m troubled by the scripts i trouble
the theories, telling telling stories
i read, talk and value
as i compete to balance
feeling overwhelmed

thinking

i see the women
in my community
looking tired
overloaded
ill
talking of battles
and going to war
finding the energy
to tackle
is this work?

what do i see for myself?

where is the meaning of life
love
what is a writing life?
being able to be alone
reflect on my lived experiences
the oxymoron
of the living life
this work

there are times when
i can laugh
at this work
other times i
cry
for the
women’s work in the academy

where is my work?
where to begin
end
finish writing
the dissertation
the book
the novel
this is work
i like this work
but

wonder about the place
of women
professors’
graduate students’
work
in teaching and research
what are we keeping
what are we losing
what are we changing
what’s in this work?
this
drudgery
grind
toil
exertion

this work
often unpaid
is
labor
an enterprise
a profession
an accomplishment
that is work
work
work for what?

caught in the
crossfire
stuck between what i do and what i ought to
like
the bird in the cage
wanting to get out
be free
from the bars that seemingly hold me

A POSITION NARRATIVE: WHO AM I/EYE?

Chloé asks me, “Why do you study girls, women and feminism? There’s never been a problem with your life.”

I breathe. Huh.

I smile at her.

“No problems?” I look directly at her.

And I chuckle. There are stories that we talk about and others I do not want to talk about, yet.

What do I tell Chloé? When is a good time to tell her about “problems?” I know her problems will not necessarily be mine. What can she learn from hearing problem stories? Who gains? When as her mother do I share silenced stories? We have begun our conversation. So what is the problem?

As a teacher I look and listen for a teachable moment. We talk about what we watch in relation to possible meaning as we author our lives. As a researcher I am intentional in sustaining a space to linger, to slow down time to think about what is seen and heard. I know I watch and listen with intensity. I know my work did not just come from nowhere. I have written through/with/against my sexed identity, reflecting on experiences of my body since my girlhood. I watch, and I have learned to attend to gender, identity, and to employ a frame of suspicion while engaging in “unruly practices” (Fraser, 1989). What matters in my life and the lives of these girls means speaking about the often unspeakable: the politics of the body; the pleasure and pain experienced as bodied persons.

As a graduate student of curriculum, I think about knowledge claims made about/on/through/against/with girls. Who makes knowledge claims: journalists, psychologists, sociologists, educators? I wonder what sense Chloé makes as she looks at my book shelves. I see an extensive influence of women’s words and women’s photographs. I listen to her question of why and find myself questioning again: What is the problem? Why study girls? I wonder if Chloé subscribes to a postfeminist position that tells us “the women are all right.” I think that we are just beginning to figure out the lives of girls. And as a researcher I am mindful about how I am doing research and I ask myself: why I am doing research; why girls?; and who I am in constructing a re/presentation with girls?

I am mindful to educative and “miseducative experiences” (Dewey, 1904, 1938). I watch inside and outside of schools. I hear school stories from Chloé, her friends, and parents at her school. I work as a researcher in schools. Education conversations are much on my mind. As a mother I watch from the outside. I try to look in, be invited to see. But it is hard. What I hear are stories of abusive practices by those in power. The reproduction of abusive practice presses discomfort on my body and is calibrated by experience, almost like a measuring instrument for difference, so discomfort is informative and offers a starting point for new understanding (Bateson, 1994, p. 15). I am troubled with what I see as miseducative experiences. These experiences frame my knowing and make me question what is seen. I question my discursive practices of seeing and how that influences my narrative knowing. I would be pretentious to think that I can “see through,” “see clearly,” or “ascertain.” However, I can describe and show.

I always wanted to be a photographer. I mean a “real” photographer, not just in my research work, but in the larger public. My opportunity came when Ronna telephoned asking if I would like to be the “official photographer” for a Hope Foundation fundraiser. This was a first-time photographing, in a larger public. This was a luncheon for about 250 people at the fundraiser. I feel comfortable behind the camera, a source of companionship, holding a hand to enter an unfamiliar place. Holding my camera means my gaze captures the people knowingly or not. I asked people about being photographed; other times I watched and snapped. I captured posed shots: ones of Tommy Banks in conversation and of his fingers dancing on the piano keys; ones of presentations for people being publicly acknowledged; and ones of people talking and visiting.

In high school I read Life magazine. I liked the full-page glossy pictures and wondered if I might recreate some of those photo-journalistic images. I imagined myself as a photo-journalist photographing private experiences, the missed, distorted stories from the dark brought to light. I created black and white photographs in the dark room, hours of pleasure in making visible the invisible. This research is a frame of coming to know self as a teacher educator while questioning my practice of seeing.

WHAT MATTERS

What matters makes a problem out of everything:

a problem

a puzzle
a dilemma
a riddle
a question

to be fixed?
answered?

Demanding that girls be considered not only changes what is studied and what becomes relevant to investigate, but it challenges the existing disciplines politically. Girls have not been omitted through forgetfulness or mere prejudice. The structural sexism of most academic disciplines contributes actively to the production and perpetuation of gender hierarchy. What I learn about the world and people is ideologically patterned within a prescribed conformity of a social order that is produced and reproduced. Studying girls is not just about girls, but about the culture and ideological schemata that sustains a regime of power in the world, namely those of class and those of race. I am not attempting to replace/substitute gender with class or race, but I want to challenge authoritative cultural scripts in the making of girl culture.

I wonder about questions of research issues, membership of movements/canons/fields and the question of what is a girl? What is an educated girl? What matters to them? These questions are posed not to straitjacket the studies of girls, but to open and go in search.

As an educational researcher, I talk with girls about what matters to them. I do not exclude myself. As a teacher and as a researcher I reflect on what I evade, dismiss, ignore when I see and hear stories girls tell me. I need to be present fully to hear and see what girls tell me, and then responsibly, I might, hopefully, retell and re/present the shared understanding for change among the girls and myself. I promised the girls that they would be engaged in the re/presentation of this research. I was mindful in my protocol of place as researcher, and I shared studies about girls with the girls in this visual research.

Sadker and Sadker (1980, 1994) and Gaskell, McLaren, and Novogrodsky (1989) report that female culture and public school contexts reflect traditional androcentric beliefs that create inequality for girls and women. Recent reports of teaching may be inadequate for problems undermining adolescent girls’ education (American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 1992; Gilligan, Lyons, & Hanmer, 1990; Holmes & Silverman, 1992). Girls enter school as feminized bodies, a sign, suggesting that girls go through a “crisis of self esteem” at the crossroads of puberty (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Gilligan, 1987, 1991; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994). Who does not go through a crisis at puberty? But for girls, the authors tell us, it is all different. We go from being tough, loud and strong girls to becoming demure, quiet, and self-conscious adolescents. These theories frame one knowing of girlhood.

I see girls’ lives as simpler, more sincere, before we have to think of our selves as sexual bodies, before our bodies become “womanly,” the focus of outside criticisms, outside lusts, outside evaluation (Bach, 1993, 1995; Bordo, 1991; Brownmiller, 1986; Fine & Macpherson, 1995; Fine &Zane, 1991; Rubin, 1994; Walkerdine, 1989, 1990; Wolf, 1990;). As I reflect, I wonder: does any body actually go through a simple and naive period? It seems that our girlhood stories are immersed with exposure to sex at too early an age: genital exposure by the man next door, the guy jerking off in the car who called us over, the copies of Playboy seen in homes, older boys trying to look up our skirts before we even knew how to touch ourselves “down there.” Our girlhoods may not have been made of tragedy and abuse, but were they made of “sugar and spice?” Since riot grrls put the growl back into girlhood, the meaning of girl has changed. I realize how much the girl-trend has saturated my thoughts as I look at popular culture, bookstores, and research.

One way I can come, literally, to my senses is by seeing the images that the girls produced. Then, by listening to their voices, I have come to know however different my life is from theirs. These are my insights, my composition of reuniting the girl with her body and attending to the girl-in-body, the lived bodily experience of the girl. I have had to learn to see myself through multiple eyes:

Women have had to learn to be attentive to multiple demands, to tolerate frequent interruptions, and to think about more than one thing at a time. This is a pattern of attention that leads to a kind of peripheral vis...